Lately I’ve been seeing a number of posts about the future of journalism, and more specifically, how legacy publishers still struggle with digital models. Here’s one example posted on Medium (made famous recently by Jeff Bezos). We can track the emergence of the Internet as a force to the mid-90s—many pundits, including Dr. Joe Webb, tie this to Netscape’s IPO when the Internet really began to penetrate the public consciousness. In the printing industry, we moan with hindsight at being blindsided by the impact of the Internet. There were so many naysayers back then. “It’s a fad,” was a common refrain. That, of course, turned out to be a patently false assumption.

Legacy publishing also had its blind spots—many of them. They moaned about trading analog dollars for digital dimes. They struggled with how to protect the content they developed as well as the financial models that had served them for many years. They fought the concept that information should be free. After all, they were investing many millions of dollars in newsrooms, investigative journalism, and more.

The Wall Street Journal was one of the early adopters of paywalls for digital content, and it worked for them. More recently, the Journal has been testing a subscription prediction model that gives a score to visitors based on how many times they have visited the site and other data points to determine how much free content to allow them and how likely they are to actually subscribe. Whether that works remains to be seen, but the Journal continues to lead the way in this regard.